


your heart's too loud (go home, go home)

by eurydiced



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Almost Kiss, Canon Compliant, Game: Kingdom Hearts II, Gay Hayner, M/M, Pining, i have a thing for characters pining for people in their dreams and my god it shows, rated T for hayner's potty mouth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 10:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21390304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurydiced/pseuds/eurydiced
Summary: The mirror was still cracked in one corner from that time he’d practiced his Struggle swing with a little too much vigor. A shard of his wrist stood disjointed from the rest of him, a tacked-on fragment of another Hayner.What’s missing?*(hayner's heart remembers.)
Relationships: Hayner & Olette & Pence & Roxas (Kingdom Hearts), Hayner & Olette & Pence (Kingdom Hearts), Hayner/Roxas (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52





	your heart's too loud (go home, go home)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oathkeptroxas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oathkeptroxas/gifts).

> rip this has been lying in my drafts since...........july 2018............i originally meant it as a birthday gift for @oathkeptroxas but life got in the way...............sorry jodie please take this very late offering of your rarepair xoxo

When Hayner woke up that morning, there was a missing piece.

Which made no sense. Hayner frowned into his pillow, still blinking against the golden light of the new day, grasping at half-formed thoughts which flitted out of reach even as he was rousing himself from sleep. What was he missing? He fumbled blindly for his bedside table, and—

Nope. His phone was still there. So was his wallet, his hair gum, the two ice cream sticks with _winner_ printed on the wood. When he propped himself up by the elbows, he took a quick inventory of the cramped room: shorts crumpled in a heap on the floor, skateboard listing against a wall and sun-bleached photos of Pence, Olette and him pinned to the back of the door. Everything present and accounted for. Right?

Hayner stared at the photographs. Something was wrong with them.

He groaned, hitting himself with the heel of his hand. _Snap out of it!_ He’d slept in late, and the others were probably waiting on him. This weird feeling, like a loose pebble rattling around in his ribcage, or sand shifting under his feet, had to pass sooner or later.

(Or like a picture puzzle—a thousand-piece puzzle with a corner missing, a corner of the sky. And the hills and trees and flowers and everything that mattered was clear and complete, but your eyes drift to that corner anyway, because it’s only empty blue but it’s not _there_.)

Hayner rolled himself gracelessly out of bed, landed on one knee, and scratched his neck on the way to the bathroom. Splashing his face usually worked, but this time the icy shock wasn’t enough to shake his unease; he turned off the cold tap and braced both hands against the edges of the sink, scowling at his reflection. The mirror was still cracked in one corner from that time he’d practiced his Struggle swing with a little too much vigor. A shard of his wrist stood disjointed from the rest of him, a tacked-on fragment of another Hayner.

_What’s missing?_

He had his mom, and his older sister. School—ugh—was definitely not missing, and neither (ugh) was Seifer. His friends, Pence and Olette and—

_Ugh._ Headache.

He rubbed his eyes with a grimace. It—it was that whole Sora thing. Yeah. It _had_ to be. Between three strangers dropping out of the sky, rumours about those white undulating monster _things_ lurking in the town’s dark corners, and _whateve_r the hell Sora had been crying about, yesterday was. Well. _Bizzare_. He’d been perfectly happy complaining about homework when that strange boy waltzed into their private hangout (the place Pence had put their stake in when they were twelve, which Olette had made into something like a home, which Hayner had cracked Seifer’s nose to protect) like he’d _owned_ the place. When he’d locked eyes with Hayner (blue and bright, blue as the side of the sky they rarely saw in Twilight Town), it jolted him. Dislodged something in his chest. Suddenly it seemed a little harder to breathe.

So, he may have overreacted. Slightly. As Olette and Pence enjoyed telling him a little too much. But something about Sora, for all his sunniness, had Hayner throwing walls up.

Maybe that was just how Sora was. _Whatever_ he was, it wasn’t Hayner’s definition of normal. Aside from all the obvious weird crap, in minutes he had Pence _and_ Olette flying to his defense, and Hayner had to admit that there was something disarmingly genuine about the kid. And familiar. Which was probably why he’d made Hayner feel so strange and vulnerable.

Probably.

Whatever. Sora and Donald and Goofy were gone, vanishing onto that weird train, and Hayner had his own dull, ordinary life to get back to. No time for white monsters. Or mouse kings. Or sparkling, skylit eyes.

* * *

Distraction almost worked.

Almost.

When Hayner landed in the usual spot, he was accosted by Pence and Olette, too caught up in a heated debate over the Classic Kingdom remake to rib Hayner for sleeping in. After siding with Pence for fifteen intense minutes, they settled in their regular places (Pence and Olette at either end of their favourite sofa, Hayner in front of the vents) and knuckled down to work on Hayner’s tournament action plan. There was no dancing around it: Seifer had knocked Hayner on his butt last week, claiming the Struggle trophy, and stronger than Hayner’s mortification was his resolve to wipe the floor with Seifer’s self-righteous beanie-wearing ass next summer. That meant _practise_. Which would have been easier if Hayner had a friend to Struggle with, but neither Pence nor Olette had ever been that athletic. What Olette _did_ have was an uncanny ability to create and enforce timetables—like a best friend, a soccer mom and a personal trainer in one cute, button-nosed package.

The strange feeling didn’t _fade_, exactly, but it was nice to have something else to focus on. When the late summer heat started getting to them, Hayner dashed over to the tram common for ice cream. It wasn’t until he brushed through the old blanket curtaining off their spot’s entrance that he realised he’d bought four.

Pence and Olette’s voices died when they saw him. They stared at Hayner’s hands, two ice creams in each. A thin silence stretched been them. Hayner shifted from foot to foot, that shifting-sand sensation striking with vengeance, and grappled with the sudden, irrational urge to throw the popsicles away.

Olette was the first to break her stare. “You can have the extra one, Hayner,” she said, looking down. “It’s okay.”

It dawned on Hayner, with a stomach-dropping sensation, that maybe they were feeling this too.

He cleared his throat, settling back in his seat and passing sea salt ice creams around as Pence and Olette drew them all back to the plan. But they avoided each other’s eye, and the sudden vacuum in the room. Once, out of the corner of his eye, Hayner caught Olette turning her money pouch over in her hands quizzically.

So it went. School began, and with it came track and field and homework (and a concerned phone call or three to Hayner’s mom), and Pence dumping conspiracy theories on him in between dragging him to drama club and quizzing Olette for the mathlete team and dodging his sister’s well-meant questions. And when the school bell rang Hayner was the first out of his seat, pulling his tie and racing to beat the others to the back alley.

But nothing—not even Seifer’s goading—could shift that sense of an empty space. More than once Hayner found himself waiting outside the room after class for no one in particular, or turning to pull faces at a vacant seat.

“It doesn’t make _sense_,” he groused.

The others _hmm_ed, legs swinging over the daunting drop to the station plaza. Even the view from the tower seemed strange, the sunset over-saturated and sharp. Too much red. Something cold dripped onto Hayner’s hand; he licked it and tasted salt.

“It’s like someone left. Like someone we know moved away and took the memory with them, and it freakin’ _sucks_ but we don’t know _why_.”

The others _hmm_ed again. They’d hung out here, at the ledge overlooking the great clock face, ever since Hayner stumbled across a neglected back door in the station. No, he’d stumbled across it with someone else, a friend who— no. Wait. Hayner frowned at his ice cream. _Have I ever been up here?_

_Depends. Which you?_

“Which—what?” He looked up, finally, away from the sorbet sky—was it Pence who spoke, or Olette?—but there _wasn’t_ a face there next to him. Or, no, there _was_ a face—a mouth, he guessed, and maybe a nose, probably a shock of hair, but the only detail Hayner could actually make out was the eyes. Warm blue, like the sky.

The stranger smiled, and opened his mouth to speak.

That’s when Hayner woke up.

Like dreaming of falling—Hayner landed back in his own body with a force that punched the air out of his chest and snapped his eyes open. Groggy, half-panicked, he wrestled with his tangled sheets until he hit his lamp and banished the pre-dawn shadows from his bedroom, watched the clock until the fog cleared between his ears and the inexplicable _thumpthumpthump_ of his heart began to slow, and stared at his hands as he picked his way through the pieces of the dream.

“What,” he said, two minutes later, “the actual fuck.”

* * *

Okay. So.

So.

Maybe this wasn’t all in his head.

Or it _was_ in his head, and there was something seriously wrong with it. Because he’d had dreams, plenty of them, and he knew how they were supposed to feel.

You weren't supposed to wake up in a dizzy dread, sick rising to your throat and lurching upwards. You weren't supposed to feel like you hadn't been sleeping at all. They weren’t supposed to be vivid enough to hurt. It might have made a little more sense if they were nightmares, but—well, more often than not Hayner’s nightmares were of a more predictable variety. The losing-to-Seifer-with-his-pants-down, surprise-phone-call-from-dad, whatever-slasher-movie-he-shouldn’t-have-watched-last-night variety.

There was nothing nightmarish (or there shouldn’t be) about racing down market street, deftly angling his skateboard around cussing shoppers, challenging his own luck to fire a shit-eating grin to a friend over his shoulder. Or whacking his friend over the head with a foam bat, cackling when he swore vengeance. Or ice cream on the beach, kicking up salt water, sabotaging each others’ sandcastles.

Except there was white noise where his friend should be.

And Hayner would stir awake with a weight on his chest, digging into his quickening heart. Like loss, almost. Loss with no direction or meaning.

In some of these not-memories, the boy spoke.

(_What kind of question is that?_ C’mon, dude, just answer it. _Like you don’t know the answer._ Alright, then. If you had to eat one ice cream flavour—that _isn’t_ sea salt—what would it be? _I...I dunno. Sea salt is the only one I’ve ever tried._ You’re kidding. Wow, you’re _not_ kidding. So why do you like sea salt so much? _A good friend introduced it to me._)

Inane shit like that.

One night, Hayner was on the floor of someone’s bedroom: ochre walls, chaotic bookshelves, the sun slinking out of sight. The only light in the room was the pale blue glow of the oceanic lamp by the other boy’s bed. Hayner kicked his legs, watching fish silhouettes swim across the ceiling. Were they blinking at him? He felt smaller.

“It was just so dumb! I don’t wanna kiss anyone else ever.”

_Was it really that bad?_ said the blur on the bed, eyes dropping to Hayner. They were bluer than the lamp. _I mean, don’t you think that’d hurt Olette’s feelings?_

“Whatever, she didn’t like it either. I saw her face. And we laughed about it and everything, but now everyone’s talking about it like it was some big thing and it _wasn’t_. Pence won’t throw away the stupid photo either. Stop laughing!” He held up a battered old blitzball. “I’ll use this.”

The blur covered his quirked mouth. _Maybe I can talk Pence into throwing it away. Or we’ll steal his Gameboy and make him trade._ He dropped his legs over the side of the bed and slid onto the floor, next to Hayner. _So, uh...never ever?_

“Ever! It’s gross anyway. Why do grown ups do it?”

It was thoughtless, like most of the things Hayner said. But he stirred awake with a weird pit of guilt in his stomach, and carried it for the rest of the day. He couldn’t shake that final, lingering shot in the dream: the other boy’s silhouetted face, a vague side profile, softened by the gentle radiance of the lamp. Why did he care what the dream-boy thought?

When Hayner arrived at the usual spot forty minutes late that day, library book tucked under one arm, Olette tried to swipe it from behind. “Ooh, what’s this? Don’t tell me you’re reading one of Pence’s creepy conspiracy books.”

“_Hey—_” He snatched it out of reach, cheeks pink. Another _hey!_ echoed from Pence’s corner. “Just some light reading, is all.”

“For you?”

“I read!”

“Sure,” Pence piped up from the old sofa, grinning. “An ice cream wrapper, maybe.”

“The logo on your skateboard,” Olette giggled.

Pence waggled his eyebrows. “Seifer’s training schedule?”

“_Ugh_, okay. Smartasses.” Hayner flopped on the other end of the sofa with exasperated flair, surreptitiously dropping the book under his gym bag—_Lucid Dreaming: Unlocking the Secrets of the Unconscious Heart_—and pointedly ignoring the strange flutter in his stomach at Pence’s thoughtless tease. “Can we get on with this stupid essay now?”

* * *

It took almost two weeks of practise and uneasy sleep. But Hayner could be _very_ dedicated when he gave enough of a shit, and one night—finally—when the boy visited his memories again, Hayner was ready for him.

It was a dream he’d had before: they’d made it to the beach, for once, all four of them. They must have been there for hours by now, and the sunlight had soaked into their heads and left them drowsy, languishing on their beach towels with their shorts rolled over the knee while their feet dried. But at some point in the afternoon the wind had picked up viciously and flung Olette’s beach umbrella into the ocean; she’d squealed, snatching Pence up by the elbow to help her rescue it. Hayner and the boy, in the true spirit of friendship, sat there and tried not to laugh.

Hayner glanced out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t see it, but somehow he knew the shape that mouth was making. The cupid’s bow. The glimmer of a smile.

He lingered there. Just for a minute.

The boy coughed into his hand. _Should we, uh, help them?_

Normally, this would be where Hayner cracked wise about Pence and Olette having it handled; a few minutes later the other two would trudge back up the beach, successful but soaked, Olette pouting while Pence cheerfully asked if they’d snapped any photos of the whole thing.

But Hayner had followed every step in that book to the letter. He focused instead on the world sleep built around him: the hazy sky dripping into the ocean and coarseness of wet sand between his toes. He dug his hands into it and resisted the script, a rebel actor. _I'm dreaming, _he thought, bracing himself with a sharp breath. _This is a dream._

“Are you supposed to be here?” was what Hayner said instead, glancing over. Again, he saw the boy—a face, with a nose and a mouth and hair—but he couldn’t seem to make out any features beyond that, except for the eyes which blinked a little in surprise. Those eyes unsettled Hayner. They were bright and disarming and way, way too familiar.

_I...guess not._

The boy’s hand was there, splayed against the shared blanket, inches away from Hayner’s. He tried not to think about it.

“‘Cause I remember this happening, and you weren’t there that day. At least, I don’t _think_ you were. So how come I’m remembering you?”

The boy flinched, pulling his knees to his chest, but he didn’t move that hand. He was quiet for a long minute; the taut silence plucked at Hayner’s heart, but stronger than guilt was his impatience. It had been two long, restless months. “It’s not a hard question, alright? Just tell me what the hell’s going on! I feel like I’m going _crazy_ here.”

_I know the feeling,_ the boy muttered. He scratched his neck, likely sunburnt. The itch across Hayner’s face told him he was too. _I, uh. I think...I heard, once, that sometimes humans’ hearts remember things their heads don’t, or someone else’s heart can do the remembering for you. Or something._

“Humans’ hearts? What, like you’re not human?”

The boy shrugged. Of course he did.

“I—I don’t get it. Are you saying that you’re remembering _for_ me?”

_I don’t know. Is that possible for someone like me?_

Maybe it was exasperation, or the lucid-dream-state had left Hayner a little delirious, or maybe it was just how fucking surreal this whole situation was. Either way, Hayner had to laugh. “Wow. If you’re asking _me_, we’re both screwed.”

The boy laughed, too. It wasn’t exactly happy—more resigned, like feigned emotion—but their laughter blurred like they’d grown up together. For a second, they were two best friends at the beach again. Hayner almost found himself swept back up with the flow of the dream.

He caught himself, just about, and cleared his throat. “Okay. If you’re gonna be an asshole and keep showing up in my dreams every night, can you tell me who you are?”

A shadow crossed the boy’s expression. Bitter, almost. _Just...Nobody._

“That’s not an answer.”

_It’s the best I got._

Hayner groaned. “Can I at least see what your face looks like?”

_You can’t see my face?_

“Does it sound like I can see your face?”

The sighs of the surf had faded. There was no sign of Pence or Olette.

_Maybe you just need to focus. To—to really reach out for the lost memory. I know it sounds weird, but it can work. I had a friend, she—_ The boy stopped. Rubbed his face._ Never mind. Just try it._

Hayner was quickly getting used to weird. He swallowed, crossing his legs and tried to stare at the boy directly. It wasn’t easy. The longer he looked at where a face should be, the more his eyes strained and his brain hurt, a heavy thrum kicking up behind the temples.

He grimaced against it and squinted harder. The eyes. He _knew_ those eyes. He could start there. Round and true blue and framed with blonde lashes, young and tired at the same time, flickering with guarded hope. Where did he know them from? They wanted, desperately, to be pulled into focus. They were—

Sora.

They were _Sora’s eyes_.

Something shattered. The fog fell away in pieces—a rush of blood to the head—and the boy’s face became knife-sharp and vivid.

The eyes were Sora, maybe, and so were the cheeks, but nothing else: a pointed chin, a slender nose and soft, honey-hued hair splayed at odd angles like a pale star; thin eyebrows drawn together where Sora’s would be arched with a smile; a melancholy mouth. Freckles drifted across his pale face, like dustlight spinning in afternoon sun.

Spinning, spinning, spinning.

Shit. He had a _face_.

And it was close. Like, _really_ close. Close as in Hayner had been focusing too hard on the boy’s eyes to realise how far he’d leaned in, and now they were virtually nose-to-nose and fingertip-to-fingertip, and with the rest of the dream faded around them there was nowhere else to look.

Hayner froze. His breath suspended in his throat, heart suspended, brain suspended, _everything_ stopped for this, and the other boy looked like he was barely breathing too: parted lips and anxious eyes. If he were awake, he’d have snapped away—cleared his throat and continued like it never happened—but it was a face that felt familiar. And he’d never seen it when he was awake, and the closeness triggered screeching alarm bells in his head, and this whole thing was so _fucking_ weird, but—but he was happy. And that didn’t make any sense.

He tried to say the boy’s name, but it emerged as a burst of static. A stolen word. Hey, didn’t that reminded him of something?

_Did it...work?_

He couldn't say yes. The hope in the boy's face was a little heartbreaking, and _yes_ felt too much like a promise.

“I…” His voice cracked. “I hate this. I _hate_ how this feels.”

_Do you...want me to wake you up?_

Hayner’s chest would cave in any second.

But the boy's hand was warm, and so was his breath, and his freckles flickered like stars. “No.”

Turned out, they didn’t have much of a choice.

Hayner blinked half-awake. His blankets had been kicked to the foot of his bed, and the digital clock flashed 2:30. It was the only light in the room. Hayner traced a thumb across his lip, where he still felt the ghost of the boy's breath, with hands that felt too distant from his body. Limbs like vapour, though his ribs had collapsed to the bed and swept his aching heart into the debris.

Hayner hurled his blankets aside—desperate to _breathe_, flinching around the missing shard that scraped his insides, maybe a hand or an eye _or_—and stumbled away, over the skateboard and the Struggle bat, catching himself on the bathroom sink like his legs would glitch away. Because the fog of the dream hadn’t completely lifted, everything still hazy and unreal, and Hayner could still hear the rush of the sea in his ears.

His eyes flashed across his fractured reflection, searching. There was no sunburn, no sea salt in his hair; he was chalky-pale and panting in the artificial lamplight. But his trembling fingertips drifted to the corner of his mouth. There was a dusting of silver there, almost invisible, and faint fingerprints on the back of his hand.

_Hearts remember things their heads’ don’t._

The fingerprints were warm. But Hayner was shaking, ice cold.

**Author's Note:**

> (might add a second chapter.......if uni doesn't kill me.......stay tuned i guess?)
> 
> EDIT: if you liked this roxner angst, _please_ check out jodie's roxner / roxas character study oneshot [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25514434)! it made me emo as hell i am in pain :')


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